Smoke and Mirrors Page 2

  The skateboard was a fantasy tool for me. Ozzie (short for Osmond) was still part of my life in those days and as good as it got when it came to having a loyal but weird friend for a weird kid. My parents never said much to Oz because they didn’t like him. They said he had a funny smell — it was the foreign cheeses he ate with much gusto. They said he was a bad influence — he had introduced me to cracking my knuckles and skateboarding. They said I should get other friends.

  Pretty much all of my friends up to that point had been imaginary. Or as I explained it, they existed on an alternate plane of existence. Which didn’t mean they weren’t real; they just weren’t here.

  Oz showed me videos of young, fearless kids not much older than us doing death-defying feats, and I knew I could do those things. I wanted to fly on my skateboard. It was inconceivable that I could be injured.

  We started out on steep streets racing straight down the white line towards ill-placed stop signs. No slalom, no turns at all, just straight cowabunga-screaming gravity-fed speed. I liked the way the wind felt in my hair and the sound it made in my ears. I used my mental powers (the ones I refused to activate in school) to will traffic to let me slide across the intersection and up the driveway of the house situated there. Sometimes there were car horns heralding my triumph, sometimes skidding tires and shouts of appreciation or rage.

  I always found a lawn or at least a flowerbed to end my spree. I was that good. I was gold.

  By the age of twelve, I had the baggy clothing and an array of scars. I had experienced road rash on nearly every inch of my body. I had a nasty attitude towards anyone who looked at me funny when I was in skater mode. Oz had somehow sobered himself up into being more cautious, but I was an adrenalin junkie who didn’t mind kissing asphalt if that was what it took.

  I was a railing artist. I skidded down metal railings wherever I could find them. I didn’t care what was at the bottom. Usually just concrete. I understood that concrete was hard and flat and unforgiving but I’d made my peace with that. Oz said I understood the physical nature of concrete — up close and personal — more than any other person on this planet or any other planet in the solar system. Oz had taken a backseat in the thrill-and-spill-a-minute world of skateboarding. He had introduced me into the lifestyle and then sat back, nursing his small wounds and watching me go for the glory. He was my number one (and only) fan.

  My mother insisted I get professional help for my “problem” (and this was not the first time for that). But it turned out that the professional help was on my side. “He’s just trying to get your attention,” Dr. Rickbenbacker told my parents. “You need to spend a little more time with your son.” Grumbling and griping the whole way about a golf game missed and potential bond business down the tubes, my father took me fishing. I wasn’t really interested in fishing. “Let’s go to the beach,” I begged. “I want to learn to surf.”

  “We’re going fishing,” he said, gritting his teeth, gripping the steering wheel tightly as he beheld visions of corporate bonds, whole truckloads of them, being sold to unwary investors by his rabid competitor, Hal Gorey.

  Turned out there was a cell phone in the glove compartment, and it rang. It rang often. The fish were not biting at the fish farm he took me to. We bought a salmon, already cleaned and filleted, as evidence of father-son bonding. Just for the record, let me say that I was not trying to kill myself. It’s safe to say, though, that skateboarding had consumed me. If there had been an ocean handy, I would have been surfing and falling off into salt water. But I had no ocean, only streets and sidewalks and elaborate steps to public buildings and railings and ornaments of various shapes and sizes. What I had to fall onto was concrete or asphalt. It was not my destination of choice, but it was what was available when I was ready to fall.

  I would be lying if I told you that I did not enjoy coming home with a bloody nose, a forehead abrasion, or a nicely mangled knee. These were all showy awards for attempting the impossible. A kid trying to liberate himself from various laws of physics and reality wants to show off his effort, if not his success.

  Ozzie had a bad habit of locating new venues for me to try — places he himself would not attempt. Twice he suggested the long, three-tiered set of granite steps in front of the downtown courthouse. Better yet, there was the metal railing going down the middle.

  It was an in-service day for teachers, the sort of day when kids have no classes and go for broke with parents away at work. Teachers were cloistered away in meeting rooms gossiping about their students and inventing new ways to bore them to tears. Meanwhile, Oz and I would rule downtown. We were twelve and had the right clothes, the right skateboards, and enough attitude to start a world war.

  The steps were impressive, and the railing gleamed in the sun. We ran up the steps and, without even a split second to determine where I might end up, I placed my board with me atop it on the railing and began my descent. It was another cowabunga moment with adults aghast, pulling their hands off the railing as I slid south at the speed of infinity. I stayed focused, kept my wits about me, and was near the bottom when something went wrong. My board caught on metal, and I was launched into the air.

  All of the arguments about safety helmets had fallen on my two deaf ears, of course, and some protective Styrofoam would have come in handy at the moment my skull made impact with the curb. A bus tire skidded to a stop a full twenty centimetres before crushing my skull, but my head had come down hard on that darned curb. I was delivered into unconsciousness and went someplace else while pedestrians tried to figure out what to do with my unconscious body. Ozzie began to cry. He thought he had killed me. He kept shouting, “It isn’t fair” for some reason, but I guess he thought I was a goner and that my life had been too short.

  Someone would later explain that my brain had been bruised (along with my ego) and that it was a pretty serious concussion as far as concussions go. I did not die and then resurrect like a Jesus Christ of skateboarders or anything. But I did travel to someplace far from Stockton.

  It was a beach, I can tell you that. And everything was shimmering (a word Mrs. Dalway says is overused). And there were two beautiful girls. (I’m sorry, but there were.) They were wonderful and sweet and they were surrounded by light. Everything was fuzzy in an extremely bright sort of way. I thought I recognized them both as my two all-time favourite babysitters, but I could not make out their faces very well. I just knew that I was someplace safe and happy. A young man with a surfboard walked up to me and held out something in his hand. I put out my own hand, palm upward, and he dropped into it twenty or so of those little shiny ball bearings used in skateboard wheels. He motioned up at the sky, and I seemed to understand that I was supposed to throw the ball bearings up, so I did.

  The little steel balls flew to the sky and hovered there, each becoming a small, beautiful planet. Everyone on the beach applauded.

  I don’t want to sound melodramatic, but it was like the first time in my life I felt truly appreciated. I felt loved. And I did not want to have to return to my old, ordinary self.

  But I eventually returned anyway — to a blinding headache and a hospital room with a TV. The Simpsons was on, and Homer was trying to save the nuclear power plant from a meltdown.

  And I remember my mother crying one time when she came into my room and thought I was asleep. I recall feeling her tears soak through my hospital gown. She said that she loved me very much and if I would only get well, she would promise to be a better mother. When I did start to get better, though, she didn’t show the same kind of affection. But both of my parents seemed relieved that I was back.

  I recall one doctor, too; I think he was still in medical school, and he had kind of long blond hair and a really relaxed way of talking to me. He was a Star Trek fan too and used to quiz me about Klingons and Star Fleet regulations. I remember that. He played chess as well, but poorly. No sense of strategy at all, and he was easy to beat.

  All the time I was in that hospital room, I never felt al
one. I had my own room — my father saw to that, big spender that he was in those days. Doctors came and went. Orderlies, nurses. But there was something else as well, like a presence of some sort, like someone was watching over me, making sure I was okay, even when no one was in the room.

  By the time I left the hospital, I had regained most of my memory, but it had holes in it. I couldn’t remember if I liked Coke or Pepsi better. I couldn’t remember which channel Star Trek was on. Or which drawer in the kitchen had the knives, forks, and spoons.

  They said I suffered some short-term memory loss, which came in handy as an excuse for doing so poorly on a math test and French vocabulary quiz (both of which I had never studied for). My parents gave me only a short, incomprehensible lecture about how foolish I had been. They bought me things to make me feel better, but my father threw away my skateboard, which the ambulance driver had kindly returned to my house after the accident.

  The doctor explained my lethargy as part of post-traumatic stress. “His accident,” he said, “has had as much of an emotional impact on him as if he had been in a war.” I did continue to have that image of the bus floating towards me the split second before I was knocked out. But that wasn’t what was bugging me. I really wanted to get back to that beach and those people on it. My old babysitters and the surf dude who handed me the tiny ball bearing planets.

  Regular life just wasn’t going to work for me anymore.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I accidentally started to pay attention to Mrs. Dalway, who was telling us she had once seen Mel Gibson acting in a live version of Macbeth, and I was wondering why he would want to do a thing like that. I had liked Mel Gibson in the movie Braveheart, and when I was thirteen, he had me thinking of taking up sword fighting as a lifelong career until it clicked in my still slightly bruised brain that there probably wasn’t much of a calling for sword fighting anymore.

  Then Mrs. Dalway read a few more lines from the bard:

  Who can impress the forest, bid the tree

  Unfix his earthbound root? Sweet bodements! Good!

  Such was my distraction that I had not been keeping an eye on Andrea, and when I looked over towards the computers she was gone.

  What I did next was considered to be quite unusual in a high school English classroom. I began to cry. I really did.

  I know. A sixteen-year-old boy crying in the middle of Shakespeare is a little weird — well, a lot weird. I mean, almost anyone at Stockton High could tell you I was not normal. Normal and me just didn’t go hand in hand. It wasn’t the first time I’d cried. I’d done it before. And it’s not just a sudden downpour of tears. It’s not like throwing up where it just suddenly happens when you eat some bad pizza.

  My crying is attached to a very deep-seated emotional response to things. I can’t watch the news, for example. If bombs are dropping or if children are starving or even if the president of the United States is spreading hatred again with one of those speeches — well, I’ll start to blubber.

  Mrs. Dalway thought I was so moved by her reading that it had unleashed the floods. She stopped mid-speech, looked my way, and seemed stunned. She had never moved a student to tears before.

  “Are you all right?”

  I blew my nose loudly. “I’m okay. Continue,” I said, droopy-faced and sodden.

  The class was laughing by now. What else could they do? Many of them had seen me act oddly before, but I was still a reliable source of entertainment. Mrs. Dalway stumbled over her lines and finally gave up. “Are there any questions?” she asked. The old standby.

  Tanya Webb, a girl whose beauty had held my attention for quite a long time, raised her hand. “Is any of this going to be on the exam?” This was the question she asked in every class.

  Mrs. Dalway set her book down on her desk and just stared at Tanya. Then, in a bit of a fluster, she asked us to spend the rest of the class writing down our impressions of Macbeth as a person and what advice we would give him if he were our best friend. Eventually the bell rang and feet began shuffling out of the room.

  I handed in a blank sheet of paper with my name on it. I was sorely afraid that this amazing girl, Andrea, real or imagined, had swept into my life for a brief encounter and then disappeared forever. I had not figured out who she was or even what she was, but I was certain she was the best thing that had happened to me in a long, long time.

  “Simon, are you sure you are all right?” Mrs. Dalway asked.

  I wasn’t all right. My world had collapsed around me like a bubble yet again and I was adrift in a meaningless universe, but all I said was, “I’ll be okay.”

  The upside was that Mrs. Dalway would probably take pity on me — or secretly be pleased that I seemed to be so moved by her Mel Gibson story and the reading — and would give me a good grade no matter how badly I screwed up. And when it came to school, I screwed up badly and often. So there was this positive aspect.

  But aside from that glimmer of academic brightness, I was devastated. Over the years my parents had invested heavily in the proper professional treatment to see if something could be done about my emotional outbursts. Although they disagreed about a lot of things during what little time they spent at home, they were unanimous in wishing they had produced a normal child instead of me.

  The skateboard near-death head injury had supposedly severed some of the connective tissue between the left hemisphere and right hemisphere of my brain. One doctor had even shown me a model of the brain in its two lovely halves. I held one half in my hand; Dr. Yumato held the other half in his. “See,” he said, “two seemingly independent parts of the brain. Now give me back the left hemisphere.”

  He wanted to prove some point about how the two were normally connected but, because I was annoyed by his condescending attitude, I would not hand back to him the left hemisphere of the brain. “This is not a game,” he said.

  But it was a game. It was all a game. I didn’t like what he was telling me about my connective tissue and I didn’t like the way he was treating me like a child. I was nearly thirteen at that point. Dr. Yumato became angry with me. “You are a very stubborn boy,” he said. This was not news to me.“You cannot be helped if you keep acting like this.”

  Maybe that’s why I kept acting like that. I don’t know, but I never did give him back his other half of the brain. It’s still in my room at home and it is one of my prized possessions.

  The doctors all agreed I could not have my two hemispheres stitched back together. There was no quick fix, no easy repair. Most thought I would just have to adapt. So I would remain a kid and ultimately a teenager with some problems. Emotional. Mental. But adapting as best as I could with my two free-floating hemispheres in my head.

  My parents were continually disappointed that they couldn’t buy their way back to having a normal son. Sometimes they argued with each other about whether I had been normal even before the clunk on the concrete. Sometimes I cried myself to sleep at night listening to them through the wall. At such times, I wished myself back on that beach I had been on with the two girls and the surfer pouring the ball bearing planets into my hands. Other times I wished I were dead.

  After my teary English class, a fight broke out between Charles Fishman and Barry Sung. It was one of those odd high school disagreements between two ethnically proud individuals. Fishman was Jewish and Sung was Chinese and they were arguing over who made better hockey players, Jews or Chinese. It’s possible that this argument had never happened before anywhere on earth, but that’s the way our high school was. I wasn’t going to be the one to break it up. I had my own problems with my right brain probably not even knowing what my left brain was doing. I wondered if I would eventually grow up to have a split personality and end up having my own arguments with myself as to who were better hockey players, left-brained people or right-brained people.

  Tanya Webb looked right at me as I walked to my locker. I had known Tanya since the second grade, and while I had evolved into this strange creature that I now
was, she had somehow matured into a beautiful and sometimes intelligent young woman. She had a legion of male admirers and I was at the far perimeter of that crowd, but she was not an insensitive goddess. And today, in post-English-class-meltdown, she took pity on me, I suppose, and walked alongside of me down the hall.

  “You really like Shakespeare, don’t you?”

  “It’s the beauty of the language,” I lied.

  “I know what you mean. It’s fluid and musical.”

  “And all those deep meanings,” I added.

  “What do you think she’ll ask on the exam?”

  Well, that was a bit of a letdown. I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to study for the exam. I never did. “I don’t know,” I said. “But maybe we can study together or something?”

  In high school, we always added vague phrases like “or something” into our conversations just to open up opportunities. My seemingly innocent proposal was pretty far out on a limb for me, but my crying jag had left me feeling reckless and, having lost my imaginary friend Andrea, I was going for broke.

  Tanya looked down and seemed to be studying the trash on the hallway floor. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I can,” she said, letting me down as gently, I guess, as she could.

  “Maybe the exam will be easy anyway,” I said.

  Tanya smiled what I’d call a one-quarter smile and fled down the hall, swallowed by the crowd of noisy end-of-the-school-day students.

  Amazingly, Andrea was there at my locker when I arrived. She had been watching me talk to Tanya. I felt a wave of euphoria sweep over me. She was back.

  “I was afraid you were gone. One minute you were at the computer and then gone the next.”

  “You’ll have to get used to me coming and going.”